Alexander vs. Aristotle, Dictatorship vs. Democracy.

you already know I like to talk about
issues in a spontaneous way I like to talk about politically loaded heavy deep complex issues in a spontaneous way which is not knowing what you got on the internet it's not on what you get in peer-reviewed academic papers or presented at conferences so this is a video I plan to make months ago we've been so busy especially just dealing with life career education travel type of things and now I'm gonna sneeze to symbolically appropriate sneeze indicating how busy where I said okay I'm not gonna make any more videos but Aristotle until we fly to France and fly back from France but just now I thought you know what why don't I sit now and do a super spontaneous video on aerosol and from my perspective it's gonna be more enjoyable and interesting because I haven't been thinking about this row been not thinking about it for long enough that I'm not really burdened with all of the reading and research at it before because I did do a lot of reading not just inside the primary source text here but of various academic articles em so I'm going to kick this off by stating what the puzzle is that Aristotle has left us about his most fundamental and obvious belief about democracy and dictatorship you could also Express this as polity and monarchy but however you want to put it whether a city-state like Athens should be ruled by the masses or should be ruled by just one man what really is is position that's now hey it's it's a big book right Aristotle's politics it's big and it's been translated many times in study women scholars how could this possibly be ambiguous well my own conclusion is that this has everything to do with the fact that the conclusion of the book is missing and part of the dramatization of his argument part of his attempt to make his argument interesting and enticing is that he was intentionally being a bit ambivalent and big and ambiguous in several stages leading up to his Shah in conclusion so say more with that the conclusion of my own video here and for me there's a really interesting and really provocative but ultimately non explanatory observation in pointing out the extent to which Aristotle was done Tonto a secret agent of macedon of Macedonia so in this political period Athens is one country and Macedonia is another and there is a very overt military as well as political struggle for which is to be the dominant power not just over Greece but over a large part of the known world from the perspective of Greece and generally speaking during Aristotle's lifetime the power of Macedonia was increasing and increasing but not steadily so not predictably so if you were living through a period of time at many points it would not have been obvious that Alexander the Great would become the only name remembered by history from papal century which he almost is Aristotle's name also is remembered and if you don't know there is indeed an historical connection between Aristotle and Alexander the Great a connection that is as well proven as anything from this period of history can be so what's the mystery I mean this is not george RR martin this is supposedly not written in riddles right this is a thesis and a morality lecture that's telling us what we ought to think and what we ought to believe so we it ought to be clearer it ought to be clear as day and not clear as mud but what it is is clear as mud okay so I'm reading from about section 1287 B so what I'm saying to a section 1287 this is ultimately the manuscript pagination you can use this to find the correct page and every any given translation or addition in any language English Greek French whatever other or translation you have to have so using that Universal number system we're starting around twelve eighty seven to twelve eighty eight here okay when it happens that the whole of a family or even a single person is of Merit so outstanding as to surpass the merit of all the rest it is only just that this family should be vested with kingship and absolute sovereignty or that this single person should become a king and absolute sovereign okay pause so if we just read you that that sentence anyone would be within the rights to say oh whoa Aristotle clearly supports dictatorship whether its monarchy or some other kind of situation like having one king rule that's completely clear but probably all of you watching this video know in some broad sense Aristotle is remembered as a philosopher of democracy and to some extent by and for democracy so I'm now just gonna skip a couple of sentences really so still on the same page were around 1288 in the original pagination skipping just a couple of sentences down the same page he then says quote it would be no less improper to require him to take his turn at being a subject under a system of rotation a hole is never intended by nature to be inferior to a part and a man so greatly superior to others stands to them in the relation of a hole to its parts okay so this is the bizarre claim not that democracy is the hole and say the president the one leader of the democracy is the part it's saying that the individual man the monarch or dictator who's so superior everywhere else that he is the pole hole and that the rest of his whole society are merely his parts so this this sounds like an extreme a surreal I mean it seems like he's joking especially if you read the whole text or a larger part of those things okay so now I'm switching to a completely different part of the text so many many many pages later elsewhere on the text and this is not the only contrast you should make but this is this is one extreme contrast okay so quote oh right sorry and this is now 1332 there abouts 1332 - 1335 and the original pagination okay we may imagine one set of circumstances in which it would be obviously better that a lasting distinction should once and for all be established between governor's and those who are governed this would be if there were one class and this is in the state one class of people surpassing all others as much as gods and heroes are supposed to safar supposed to surpass mankind sorry to misspeak there a class of man so outstanding physically as well as mentally that their superiority of the ruling stock was indisputably clear to their subjects but that is a difficult assumption to make and we have nothing in actual life like the gulf between Kings and subjects which the writer psy lacks describes as existing in India we may therefore draw the conclusion which can be defended on many grounds that all should share alike in a system of government under which they rule and are ruled by turns in a society of peers equality means that all should have the same rights and a constitution can hardly survive if it is founded on injustice and the editor here adds that the clear meaning is that you cannot have a constitution that gives different rights to men who are fundamentally of the same quality who are fundamentally equal which is the the situation in reality so who we here are they somewhat bizarre or clarification the first passage I read states that in theory it would be perfectly acceptable or even preferable to have a society where men are ruled over supey a superior fam who is so superior over the the subjects that it's like the comparison between gods and normal man and of course this is ancient ancient Greece so you know what type of gods they're talking about and he specifies physically as well as mentally you know the statues it's fun and you might wonder well this is a period of time when he basically serves Alexander the Great does he have in mind that Alexander the Great is one of these godlike kings and then we have a separate passage we contrast this to where this is laughed at and scorned as being completely ridiculous apparently some other author named skylax says that that's the case in India that in India the rulers are totally superior to people being ruled well why don't some Greek who managed to travel all the way to India and back and survived to tell the tale well yeah maybe they say that about India but let me tell you in in reality he says in actuality there is no such condition in the real world in reality all of us in Athens are equal so therefore we must have democracy and his idea of democracy one of the fundamental concepts for him maybe not for our sighted a is just a replacement and rotation that today you're on the judge today you're the judge in court next year you're a member of the jury the year after that you're the person being judged in the same way it really is the jury more than the the presidency I think that he has in mind the idea of everyone participating by turns one at a time I'm now gonna read really quickly um some brief comments from this article of this is a traditional conventional academic peer-reviewed article titled on Aristotle's critique of Athenian democracy and I'm gonna tell you why I think this is significant but ultimately kind of irrelevant and distracting observation of this other big question and maybe you'd imagine this explains why why does Aristotle take this strong but paradoxical position on democracy versus monarchy however we're gonna put it ok quote the third reason stems you can tell we're starting a midstream here we're not starting on page one we're already on the third reason you don't get to hear the first two reasons go read the whole article if you want to read on the third reason stems from Aristotle's 25-year opposition to Athenian policy towards Macedon and the consequent precariousness of his position in Athens it is not surprising that he held Athens leaders in low regard it is not surprising that he considered Athens an extreme democracy governed by low birth low-income and vulgarity the choice of words here differs a bit from translation to translation but what he is hinting at when he says in some editions it is bracketed by some editors many of the people who translated this into English and modern languages are so shocked by how harsh the wording is here that they put in brackets just to suggest that this must have been added by some other author or this must be a corruption of the test they're just in disbelief they cannot believe that Aristotle's words against democracy or this harsh and are this extreme that's just an editorial it's a human reaction it's an emotional reaction there's no scientific evidence for this there's no basis for this they're just shocked so again the wording is even harsher than it sounds here it's it's governed by vulgar idiots you know this is what he's saying about Athens well believe it I mean again even the two pastors just read you know I think it is fair to say that Aristotle has mixed feelings and mixed emotions and a rubber Athens was not paradise for intellectuals Athens killed Socrates and everyone was still in its shadow most of all people like Plato and Aristotle Aristotle was basically never allowed to go downtown he was a second-class citizen he was a medic so his school was located outside of the symbolic city walls but there were a lot of institutions in Athens I believe he was never allowed to set foot in maybe he was given a tour at some point but he was a second-class citizen in Athens himself and as we're gonna read here there was this question towards than he supported Alexander the Great Alexander of Macedon at a time when really Athens was fighting for its survival against Alexander of Macedon it is not surprising that he would have preferred to empower in a lead of educated gentlemen who would have neither squandered Athens resources on a warth Macedon nor persecuted philosophy moreover he was not alone in this position in the 350s and 340s i Socrates this is not Socrates if you're reading on-screen I sokrat he's if you prefer with an eye at the front had advocated a more elitist government for Athens under the title of an aerial peg 8 or ancestral Constitution like Aristotle he also courted the Macedonian King Philip and so for that matter to the head of the Academy a specific very approximate translation from someone who never studied ancient Greek many if not most of Athens leading intellectuals had broken with democracy and were in favor of Macedonian hegemony well many if not most is quite a claim you see there was a footnote there this is based on which texts of survived history Aristotle was employed for six years as tutor to King Philip's son Alexander a decade later Alexander took two of Aristotle's nephews calisthenics and Nicanor on his expedition against Persia they had served respectively as an official historian and a general meanwhile aerosol had become a close friend of the man whom Alexander left behind to govern Macedonia and to keep watch on Greece the formidable Antipater who would be the executor of Aristotle's last will and testament that is a document that survives history so we know what it says in Aristotle's last will and testament and that it names this historical figure and establishes thus that the tight political cooperation personal and political relationship between the two men Aristotle left behind correspondence with Philip Alexander and Antipater so if you don't know Philip of Macedon was the King of Macedonia and it was the father of Alexander the Great and then Alexander the Great took over Philip was in fact assassinated although little of it survives today arizo also had close ties to the tyrant of Eternia in the trode one hermaeus whose kingdom he lived in for three years following his departure from Athens and 348 blah blah blah let's skip a little bit here Aristotle first came to Athens to study in 367 and did not leave until 348 he did not return until 3:35 and stayed until his exile in 323 it has usually been thought that Aristotle left Athens in 348 following the death of Plato and Aristotle failure to be chosen as a successor at the head of the Academy it has been plausibly argued however that Aristotle was constrained to leave before Plato's death we dated to early 347 because of the ante Macedonian sentiment following Philips destruction of Olympus we do have historical records on this event it was indeed a kind of bloody and shocking massacre sort of situation stirred up a lot of anti Macedonian Empire sentiment people seem to have less trouble approving of an empire when it's massacring other people far away and have difficulty reconciling themselves to it when it's massacring your own people right at home and Alexander the Great's Empire did both and it's also very plausible that in an earlier period of his life Aristotle might have been making excuses for Alexander in a later period of life maybe he started to see the wisdom of having the democratic system or something like it something vaguely Democratic in some sense that he saw working in Athens it is certainly striking that Aristotle did not return to Athens until 335 when Alexander had just put down an anti Macedonian rebellion in the Greek city-states and that he left Athens again precisely in 323 when the news of the death of Alexander the Great occasioned a second 80 Macedonian revolt also known as the lamian war so the picture that emerges therefore is of a wealthy man who came from a city nearly 1,000 miles away from Athens he had inherited a connection to the Macedonian royal court which he energetically pursued thus placing himself in opposition to the political tenancy that dominated Athens for most of his adult life so we have here a vision of Aristotle torn between two very powerful political tendencies and this produced I don't know should I use the term cognitive dissonance it produced some mixed feelings his political writings I when you have these contradictory extreme impulses in the politics of Aristotle I don't think one is sincere and one is insincere I think he means both I think he kind of yearns for contradictory and unattainable things and the other big story that's going on here could be a separate video I guess in many ways what he's trying to do is guilt Plato off of his throne Plato's writing on politics is garbage I have actually read Plato's laws most people haven't a very long and boring book this does directly criticize and pillory Plato's laws it criticizes many contemporary authors some of whom their workers no longer extent except for his criticism of them but like Plato the one thing he has in common with Plato is the hope that in future the government will take over the role of defining controlling and guiding public education and that's the conclusion the whole book is building towards and it's the conclusion that's missing the way forward the fundamental solution to the riddle of both Athenian politics and the larger scale Greek politics that were at that time dominated by Macedonia in his opinion is improving the system of education in a sense creating a system of education in a country that had no system of education people just use private tutors there were no government schools there was nothing like that there was government military service but it was military service only all of his hope for the future of Athenian democracy or dictatorship or both is placed in a dream of public education and in that sense I think he felt he was completing the mission that started with Socrates carried on in a much transformed vehicle in the philosophy of Plato and he was bringing it to its true and final conclusion that is exactly the conclusion of the book were lacking today and that's what allows him to have these contradictory statements one of the most famous things one of the first things I was told about Aristotle was that his view was that democracy was one of the worst forms of government and you can find isolated passages saying that but you could also find long substantive positive passages both here in the politics and in a separate work that's called the constitution of Athens I think I got that right here sir here titled the Athenian Constitution long passionate seemingly sincere passages talking about all the advantages of democracy how it works so much better than monarchy or dictatorship or tyranny or what-have-you and giving all kinds of practical advice for how to improve democracy on a case-by-case basis um I guess you can say ultimately it lets him wiggle out of recommending any one form of government it lets him wiggle out of committing to support Alexander the Great at a time when everyone including his own blood relatives his own father his own political connections his direct relationship with the man who was appointed dictator of that part of Greece who was the executor of his will and his personal friend everyone was expecting him to univocal ii and enthusiastically endorsed Alexander the Great as king and he shows a fair bit of moral courage in refusing to do that but he doesn't really show enough moral courage to go all the way in opposing via the rule of Alexander the Great instead what we get is him vesting all of his hopes in education okay guys that's 20 minutes I know this video is not gonna be popular with my audience I know I'd get more viewers more appreciation if I just talked about the themes you guys are already expecting me to hear but ultimately I have a commitment to provide a higher level of substance even if I'm the only one in watching this video when I come back to look at what my life was maybe 20 years from now what it was I learned at age 40 when I remained like Aristotle a perpetual student learning new things right up until my death [Music]